She soon came to one of the spots where water had leaked through the ceiling, maybe from a fractured pipe somewhere above. Here, the concrete of the ceiling went from water-stained to actually fallen away, chunks like miniature islands scattered in the puddle below. When Vee was under the irregular hole, she lifted her head and tried to peer into its depths. Her thoughts were rolling. If she pulled herself up inside there, would the going be easier? Or would the risk of falling through another weak spot be too great? Maybe she’d be able to keep to straight lines where the ceiling joists lay beneath her.
She waited until none of the Demons – and she saw three of them now from her vantage point – were facing her way, then rose and pulled herself up through the opening, expecting its ragged edges to give way under her weight at any second. She made it up without even an untoward sound, however, and positioned herself over where she knew the joist would be. Then, she looked about her.
She was in a narrow crawl space through which a large water pipe ran (and it was indeed rusted through at the point just above the hole in the concrete), plus some thinner conduits and power cables fastened along the space’s confining walls. She could almost rise to a crouch but remained on hands and knees. Just a little light bled in through the hole, and through a few more far-spaced gaps ahead and behind her. Anyway, all she had to do was move in a straight line now. She was very satisfied – except which direction to follow? She decided just to keep heading in the direction she had already been taking, and started crawling forward on hands and knees.
Gradually a light source shone up ahead like a beacon, and it became brighter the closer she drew to it – this time not the weak glow up through a collapsed section of concrete. This light came from the left-hand wall: a solitary fluorescent tube affixed there. Directly opposite the light, a panel was set into the right-hand wall. An access hatch for the crawl space, no doubt. Vee went into wary mode again, but was also hopeful that this would deliver her into an area where she could walk upright, maybe find a secure shelter in which to rest. Already being dead, she couldn’t die, but she could feel fatigue.
This access panel was no typical metal hatch, she found when she came up on it. It was a sheet of thick translucent plastic, more a window than anything. Its surface was rippled and frosted to admit light but it couldn’t be seen through. Vee glanced from the plastic pane to the fluorescent tube, back to the window again. Was this some primitive means of security – a stranger’s silhouette showing in the window, while the stranger himself couldn’t see a thing? But Vee had faced more threatening situations since coming out of her long mental hibernation, and her curiosity was too strong for her to bypass the window and keep moving. So, laying Jay down just beside her knee, she tested to see if the window might open. It was not hinged, but neither was it fixed in place; she was able to push the panel out on the other side yet maintain hold of it so it wouldn’t drop noisily.
She tensed up, expecting a burst of gunfire perhaps. It didn’t come.
She found herself looking into a small room with a closed door. In fact, it was a bathroom, and directly below the window rested a toilet.
A toilet? The Damned (and Angels like herself, who had invaded Hell to battle the rebel armies of the Damned) didn’t need to eat, but one still felt the craving and enjoyed the process. Fortunately there were various kinds of edibles to be found or produced. But no one in the netherworld needed to void waste. True, some Demons shat, only so that they might rub this shit on restrained prisoners, or collect it in great vats in which to submerge their victims. A toilet for a particular race of Demons, then?
Vee leaned her body in and as quietly as possible rested the plastic window panel on the closed toilet lid. Then she eased one leg through the window, onto the toilet tank until she could squeeze the rest of her through. A bit tight, but she was slim enough. When she had her feet under her, on the tiled bathroom floor, she drew Jay down, then pressed the windowpane back in place.
She heard no sound behind the closed door. It was wood, apparently, but then there had once been forests and jungles aplenty in the vastness of Hades. It was not the door that filled her with a sense of confusion bordering on wonder…
There was also a shower stall enclosed by a plastic curtain. The pipe that fed it ran across the ceiling and disappeared through a little hole in the wall, obviously patched into the water system that passed through the crawl space outside. But when Vee opened the toilet, she found its bowl was empty. So was its tank when she lifted its cover off. Further, the insides of the lid and the tank itself were of a terracotta color, whereas the outsides were glazed white. So the toilet was a sham, then, fashioned out of hardened clay or some other pliable material.
Clean white-painted walls. Towel racks bearing crude towels. A sink, with a mirror over it. Vee winced at her reflection. She hoped she might make use of the shower herself, if this place proved abandoned. She tried the single faucet on the sink. Cold water came forth, a little tinged with rust. She didn’t doubt the simple drains for the sink and shower contributed to the puddles on the floor of the barren factory floor below.
Now, Vee turned to the door. Reached for the knob with her left hand, Jay tucked against her right side with her finger on his trigger.
Opening the door slowly, cautiously, she found herself in a dark little hallway. At its end, warm light and a funny fizzing sound. Static.
There were three other doors in the hallway. Vee closed the bathroom door behind her, and just as cautiously as before cracked open the door directly opposite.
Dark inside, but just enough light fell into the room for Vee to make out a wide, comfortable-looking bed. A chest of drawers. On the walls, a few apparently original paintings and drawings in wooden or metal frames. Vee suddenly felt like Dorothy delivered from a crazy world back to prosaic Kansas. Under her breath she muttered, “Jay, we’re not in Oz anymore.”
“Madam?” he whispered.
She ignored him, closed the bedroom’s door and opened a third wooden door. When she saw what lay inside, she leveled Jay at the bed with both hands and stiffened in a firing stance.
A human woman lay in the bed, covered by a rough blanket, eyes closed. This bedroom was much like the other, except that a single muted bulb glowed from atop the chest of drawers. Vee crept closer to the woman, closer, until she stood directly over her pointing Jay at her head. But the woman’s face remained unmoving, even peaceful. She was elderly. Vee looked up at the walls. In this room the walls were decorated with needlepoint projects. One of these read: HOME SWEET HOME.
Vee wagged her head. Not Kansas, then, but the Twilight Zone.
She left the room, shut the door, opened the last of the hallway’s four doors but only looked in from the threshold. A much smaller bed, and scattered crude toys.
Vee eased the door shut, turned at last to gaze down the hallway toward the source of that warm light and sizzling static. Four beds…only one occupied…
She stole down the hallway, listening for more sounds beyond that irritating screen of static. At its end, she slid her back along the wall and gingerly peeked one eye around its edge into the room beyond.
It was, of course, a living room. A black woman perhaps in her thirties (before she became an immortal, at least) sat on a makeshift sofa with a drawing pad on her knees and a stick of charcoal in one hand. A white man sat in an armchair, gazing at a TV. And sitting cross-legged on a woven rug in front of the TV was an Asian boy of maybe seven. The TV wasn’t a TV, however, but a computer terminal showing only churning pixilated snow on its monitor. None of the three people appeared jacked into the Mesh. Vee wondered if the TV were only another prop, then.
None of the three people stirred in the slightest. She couldn’t see the faces of the man or child, but the woman’s eyes were open and unblinking. Her drawing hand didn’t move. They might as well have been mannequins in a department store’s showroom.
Vee stepped fully into the room but remained leery of a trap, an ambush, Jay
still at the ready. She neared the man in the chair enough that she could see his open, glazed eyes, the snow from the monitor reflected in them.
“Hello?” she said to him. “Excuse me?”
No response. She resisted the impulse to reach out and shake him a little. Instead, she leaned close to the woman. “Hey,” Vee said. “Can you hear me?” The woman remained frozen, the tip of the charcoal stick touching the paper unwaveringly. Vee cocked her head for a better look; it was a pleasing drawing of a cottage in a snowy forest, wood smoke rising from its chimney.
Finally she hunched down beside the little boy, and in a softer tone said, “Hey, guy, can you hear me in there? Kid?”
The boy didn’t turn his head nor even blink, perhaps enraptured by images that played only in his head. Vee straightened.
So, they had shut down, then – just as she had once done. But she had apparently been tortured, and finally encased in a cement sarcophagus…left alone and forgotten for centuries until that cement prison had eroded away. She had turned her consciousness off to escape her pain, her loneliness. The only escape that was possible to her.
She looked around again at the great effort that had gone into making this little apartment secreted between the bottom and top of level 120, like an extra hidden level. All these meticulous details, crafted over time. Why go through all that only to sit down and go into a vegetative state for the remainder of eternity?
On the far side of the room was a doorway leading into a kitchen. Vee crossed the living room to enter it and look around. As in the bathroom, there was a single frosted window. Now she realized the reason for the fluorescent tube situated outside. It gave the illusion of sunlight shining into the room.
A small table and four chairs made of mismatched but white-painted wood. A working stove, tapped into a gas line. A mock refrigerator, not cold inside. If the fridge and the cabinets had ever contained food, the mixed little family had long ago exhausted it all.
A mixed family was right. Black mom, white dad, Asian son, and dear old grandma turned in early for the night, sleeping in her room. Hell had been too vast, limitless in fact, for families to find each other and be reunited, and some members had gone to Paradise while others – more often than not no great sinners but simply not having satisfied the strict qualifications to escape damnation – had been consigned to Hades. And so, new families had formed and taken in Damned children, showing more compassion than their Creator ever had. Vee was glad that, overwhelmed with pain and madness at the breakdown of His system, the Creator had obliterated Himself and was no more. Jay had told her all about that.
And to think she herself had once been one of the blessed. Despite the frustrations it had brought, she was thankful she had forgotten herself.
Vee sighed, returned to the living room and once again looked from immobile figure to figure. “Fuck it,” she said to Jay, “I’m taking a shower.”
***
Jay leaned against the toilet close at hand, keeping an eye on the door while Vee showered. The door had no lock on the inside, so first she had removed the windowpane in case she needed to make a fast escape, but when she’d heard the distant grunt of a passing Demon below she had set it in place again lest it hear her, too. Let the Demon believe the water dribbling down from the ceiling was another fracture in the ancient plumbing.
After donning her jumpsuit again she returned to the living room to contemplate its museum-like tableau. Idly she approached the large screen of the computer monitor, knelt down and looked over its keyboard. In her hands, Jay said, “I could try jacking into the Mesh from this port,” he offered.
“No…I was just thinking it would be great to watch an old movie right about now,” Vee said, straightening up. “Watch a two thousand-year-old rerun or something.” She studied the glassy-eyed family once again. “Maybe they created all this so it would be a psychologically comfortable environment to shut themselves down in. So they’d feel safer doing it.” She picked up a sculpture from a wall shelf, apparently fashioned from the same material the toilet was. “Makes me think of the tombs of the pharaohs, with all the comforts of life entombed with them. I have to say, though –” she set the sculpture down again “– it really is on the cozy side. Coziest spot I’ve come across in Hades.”
She went to sit down beside the woman on the sofa, tempted to take her sketch pad from her and page through it, but she was afraid that might rouse her. Vee realized she was no longer afraid the woman or the others might become hostile; it was more a matter of conscientiousness.
She leaned her head against the backrest, Jay across her thighs, and said, “I’m so tired. When was the last time I slept in a real bed? I can’t even remember. I could fall asleep right here and now.”
“If you like, you could lie down in one of the bedrooms. I’ll keep an eye on the door for you.”
“Jay, you’re the best Demonic gun a girl ever had.”
***
“Madam!”
In her dreams she was not an Angel warrior who had named herself Vee, but a child named Rebecca, waking in her bed on a Saturday morning. The window by her bed was open, letting in a warm-cool breeze and the sound of some extra-diligent neighbor already mowing his lawn. Smell of new-cut grass. Bird song. And a bone gun with one red eye calling to her…
“Madam!”
If Jay could have triggered himself maybe he would have, but he wasn’t pointing at the old woman anyway. She, however, was aiming a semi-automatic pistol inches from Vee’s face.
“Who are you?” the elderly woman demanded in a voice shaking more from fear than from age.
“Goldilocks,” Vee said, staring up at her.
“Don’t try to be smart!”
“Please, relax. Clearly I’m like you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you are, Damned like us or an Angel – this is our house! You’re not a part of our family!”
“I thought you were in a trance like the others.”
“I was only sleeping.”
“Do you take turns watching over the rest?”
“No.” The woman’s frown deepened. “I can’t go to sleep the way they did. I’ve tried, but I can’t. You might think I’d be the easiest one to do it, but no. Maybe it’s the opposite – because I lived longer. More to let go of.”
“So you watch over your…family.”
“Yes, just me. Which brings me to my question again – who are you, and how did you find us in here?”
“Purely by accident. My name is Vee. I swear I mean you no harm.”
“No harm? With that infernal gun of yours?”
“He’s the most pacifistic gun you’d ever want to meet.”
The old woman backed off a few steps but kept the handgun trained on Vee’s face. Though she gripped it in both hands, the weapon trembled in the air. “You have to leave now.”
Vee sat up slowly, keeping her arms spread so her empty hands remained visible. She wasn’t afraid of being killed, since her immortal soul could never be destroyed – and she would regenerate even the most severe damage to her mock body – but that didn’t mean she couldn’t feel pain. Pain was always something to avoid.
“Okay, okay, sorry I intruded,” she said. “I can see this is a very private place.” She realized something now, as she thought of returning to the crawl space through the bathroom window. She had seen no doors leading outside from this apartment. It was not meant to be readily entered, or departed from.
As if considering the same line of thought, the old woman asked, “How did you get in here?”
“Bathroom window. I was hiding from some Demons – you’re lucky they’re too big to explore up here. All I want to do is make my way to the 128th floor. Have you or the others ever heard of Freetown?” Vee stood beside the bed now.
“I’ll take that for the moment.” The old one switched her gun to one hand and dragged Jay against her leg. “No, I haven’t. We’re fine here.”
“So how long have the others been out of
it?”
“Have you seen any clocks or calendars in Hell?” the woman snapped. But then she said, “I’ve been alone a long time. I mean – awake alone a long time. I’m not alone. I feel comfort that my family is around me. They may not be fully conscious but part of them takes comfort, too, in all of us being together.”
Vee slowly lowered her arms to her sides. The elderly woman didn’t protest. She said, “So they didn’t start out with the intention of going to sleep like this?”
“No. We made this place to escape all the horror, and we lived here for a long time as a family. But the three of them found themselves falling asleep for longer and longer times. They knew what was happening. So one night we all sat and discussed it, and decided to give in to it. We were all right with the decision. We weren’t escaping each other. We wouldn’t be interacting anymore, but we’d all be here, close together.”
“Except they could do it. And you couldn’t.”
“Yes.”
“You must get lonely, even with them beside you. I’ll bet you still talk to them, even if they don’t answer you back.”
“I want you to go now.”
“Do you really? Isn’t it better to have someone to talk to?”
“Not if it’s you!”
“Do you ever miss your real family?”
The old woman’s angry voice quavered. “Did you come here to torment me? You’re an Angel, aren’t you? I can always tell. You hypocrite Angels are more sadistic than the Demons!”
Vee felt guilty for prodding her. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to hurt you. I guess I just want to understand you. I was unconscious like your family for a very long time, myself. But I’m not sure escaping is the answer. Maybe we should be changing things instead. Maybe we need to remember the life we left behind, and hurt ourselves with the memories so we won’t accept how things are.”
“If we didn’t remember how things were we would never have built this place, would we? Or made a family for ourselves. We did change things – but we four couldn’t change the whole of the afterlife, could we? So we changed this much of it.” She gestured around her with the pistol.
Worship the Night Page 2
